Hello and Salams to Reconciling Australia

“Hello Reconciliation”




Who ever you are, Hello,
I am a well regarded white skinned single mother who recently experienced an unusual series of events with connection to the Aboriginal community generally, and was wondering about the benefit to the wider Australian community of my story in the context of Reconciliation. I must say at the outset that my experiences have lead to a large quantity of personal writing, more of which I hope to publish eventually. First let me be forthright in stating that I have been long now speaking up and out against all negative discrimination based in the biological features of specific racial groups. For each and every one of us biology is the immediately life sustaining vehicle which we depend upon and so any condemnation of any specific racial feature must be held as wrong. I am a white person whom has campaigned for the rights of black skin persons whom were less resourced in childhood and youth than I. Needless to say, in the current social climate of saddening racial relations, much of what I contribute may be all too readily misconstrued. It was my children’s Faith in me that encouraged me to write at a time when they needed for my self to be better heard. I was hoping to write this article as the story of how I manage to cause for my children, while they living with a father whose opinions predominantly express racial stereotyping, a climate of Faith in the Reconciliation process between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal in the wider Australian community as a whole. However that is a story that we need hold inside for a while yet to come. This story is a quest to find what it is that we need for Reconciliation between all Australians. Why it is that Aborigine infant mortality for example is so much higher than the wider Australian community when there is a ground swell of opinion that all Aborigines need to be given the same opportunities as any other Australian? This essay is now, in 2006 , only a few years out of date to my experience, and possibly more years out of date for other persons, and immediately relevant for others. The basic stance I make is that our history and therefore the contemporary politics, and community health, etc, must be informed through real life stories. I have found my self in a relevant story to the overall context, and that is the beginning middle and end of why I write.

My mother tells me that as a young baby I was often read to from an alphabet book with an “N” for Nigger. I was an early talker and one day before even crawling I watched a local Koori fella walk past our house from the front lawn and pointed to him and said “nigger”. I know both from the many varied descriptions I have received since 1988, from people who are classed as advantaged in mainstream Anglo-Saxon society about their experiences working with the so-called disadvantaged, and from my own experience, that it is always those who are foremost among an invading, oppressing group of people to put up their hands and say “this is not my preferred way of being, how can we be better in our behaviour towards those who are experiencing oppression”, who are in line to be accused, with the full gamete of accusations, by oppressed of oppressor. What a long sentence. Yet an idea that is always a difficult one to accommodate. It is rarely different, yet for all of us who work towards reconciliation it is those exact differences that provide the strength and courage to continue. We do need to know the pitfalls of our work in order to work effectively. It was accurately described to my self once as going through a process of learning to be white. Well after committing my self to such a process and eventually reaching out to call a black woman a sister, I have experienced much difficulty, and have been consistently reinvigorated in my attempt by the Christian Love of many Aborigines and white skinned people alike. I am writing this piece of my story to encourage other white skinned people to continue in all efforts towards genuine Reconciliation when the going gets tough. Of course as an infant anyone can see I was innocent of racial abuse in calling a Koorie Man a nigger. Yet how must have he felt? I am sure that those caring for me at the time were exceedingly embarrassed by my verbal skill, and yet for my care givers it was more important that I was learning to speak than that a stranger could potentially have felt slighted. Certainly the Koorie Man could have been dismayed about the content of the culture in which I was immersed, and potentially worried for his own children going to school with white children who learnt the word nigger as babies. I now need to state that while this example is fairly innocuous it seems to be a pattern of sorts established by the needful process of integration of two cultures that to begin with were seemingly poles apart. My experiences in general are of simultaneously being portrayed as a racist and of being more readily accepted by most Aboriginal communities in my efforts than by most white communities. It has been consistently a Christian teaching that is providence behind the capacity I needfully maintain to continue to work for Reconciliation.

Giving a broad overview of my life story in the aspects that are most important to myself is insightful for those who are curious about my sense of the nature of race relations in Australia, and why I feel it may come to pass that the circumstance gets somewhat worse before there are obvious signs of improvement. Within the Church there is great scope for maintaining a Reconciliation Spirit even when there is racial violence on the street. Particularly in the modern climate of established Church hierarchies purging themselves of former misdeeds towards those in their fold who were unable to voice their experience.

I was raised in a strictly enforced code of rigorously Christian Moral discipline from my earliest years. Significantly including the basic Christian precept of being able to Forgive being a Holy virtue to aspire to at all times and accomplish whenever possible. In addition my Father is one of those wise men who knows all people need learn the hard way from their mistakes and is a strict enforcer of the need to suffer to be forgiven. “Whenever possible” is when forgiveness is a measure of capacity to forgive an individual without falling yourself into their trap, and without leaving them with any feeling of being able to get away with further transgressions. This is a lesson I could never doubt by my good family, so I guess at the outset I was well equipped to approach the whole of Reconciliation as a political debate with a compassionate heart.

My Father was an unusual fellow in that he taught, with Christian Love, a very refined form of Christian codes of conduct, yet did not accept Holy Communion at Church. In fact it was mainly my Mother who was the Church goer. Yet somehow I felt it was a special and good thing that my Father did not take communion. I once only ever questioned his behaviour and the reply was that he could not find scientific basis for belief that the bread and wine were the body and blood of Christ. I grew up with implict belief that it was simultaneously good to believe in Jesus and to prefer to reserve Faith for that which can be scientifically proven.

I was Baptised and Confirmed at fourteen, in the early eighties, at the local Anglican Church. Immediately after my confirmation, after weeks of attending confirmation classes with self assured feeling that I understood implicitly God’s Love, I very quickly arrived at the terror of being known by God in all my mood, mind and manner, and thereafter I asserted to myself that I had no scientific basis for my belief in Jesus Christ our Lord. I never-the-less attended Inter-School-Christian-Fellowship meetings and went on Inter-School-Christian-Fellowship camp, with a sever word of warning from my mother, that some Catholic girls she went to school with fell pregnant at such camps, and I knew implicit in what she said was that I would never be going on away with friends for the Canberra equivalent of Schoolies week, so to forget about that aspect of the social structure I existed within, and I did. I rebelled to all outward appearances, yet in a highly socially mature way, albeit quite open to opinions of many varieties of politics.

As a teenager rebelliously living a lifestyle my parents were not able to accommodate in 1988 I was a passenger in a vehicle on the way to Sydney for Invasion Day Protest March and Rally, and very important events they were too. We were well prepared. In some kind of political machination I was not cogniscent of, though present and in agreement with, my name had been provided within the ACT Trades and Labour Council as the Convenor of the Canberra Bi-centennial Protest Group, the BPG. It now somehow feels somewhat akin to the BFG for anyone who reads Roald Dahl. On a more serious note these were life altering event for me. I was able to change vehicles in Mittagong into the Canberra Rape Crisis bus that was in use by members of Women Against Racism, a Canberra based radical action and education group that was a well regarded voice academically as well as by local Koories in Land Rights activism. It had begun from the Women’s Services shift on the picket of the South African Embassy. I distinctly recall my mother used always to toot against racism driving past the protest outside the South African Embassy, until she was pulled over by the police that is for beeping a motor vehicle horn illegally. However as fearless fighters against racism myself and my comrades armed with Land Rights flags were in January 1988, more that ready and willing to be arrested in compassion for the plight of the folk on whose land we breath.

Well the turns life takes are never what we most expect. Aboard the vehicle in which I travelled was a woman who was close friends with folk on board the Convoy travelling from remote and other parts of Australia bringing old people to perform sacred ceremonies to Sydney. It was Tanya McConvil, who, with poetry insured that I knew I needed to learn to be white before any equitable approach to any Aborigine community could be possible, and I took her “Sister Rap” seriously and learnt being white well. It was by our acceptance of being white, of being who we are, that we were acceptably included in a convoy of Traditionally Oriented Aborigines engaged in ritual business. I travelled in a vehicle with people for who dogmas like Classical Marxism and Feminism were an honourable religion, there was the imperative made clear that the events on 26th January 1988 would not be political.

The convoy had then been very recently required to grieve the parting from life of a well regarded and Great Australian during their passage to Sydney, and made a change of plan to spend a night in Mittagong. A Uniting Church volunteer who was a local high school teacher organised use of the High School grounds for the night and my whole night was imbued with the Music of Traditionally Oriented Aborigine Life. It may seem of small significance, yet ever since that occasion I am with strong feeling of intrinsic safety in most Aborigine company, and I Dream clapping sticks, digeridoo and a language I can not translate into English. All the sounds of Aboriginal languages feel peaceful to me, and I feel a blessing in and am always in gratitude for. An additional blessing I was provided with, was the experience of being in a minority as a white skinned person, an experience that all too few of those in our mainstream culture attain.

Many many white and other skinned people of many ethnicities have studied Aboriginal Culture and Languages, I don’t claim to understand Aboriginal culture any better than any of those who have lived within it. There are good relations on the whole today between those who are the subjects of study and those whose paid employment it is to make records of culture. There are a few significant misrepresentations of any Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal culture that I need to attempt to clarify before any venture into discussing any Aboriginal Cosmological framework, and will state up front that I believe there are all too many young Aborigines in urban settings who try, without any stable cultural base from any quarter, to emulate traditional culture yet can not maintain such without working to be accepted within by those who are working to maintain that culture. Too many without any idea are being caught in a mainstream cultural bias about what Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal culture is. For example any person could say they Dreamed true an ancient known Dreamtime myth and so attempt to lay claim to being a character in that story, yet within all cultural rule the story of how they live and whether their actual life conforms to those Dreams is essentially what makes the person live in their Dreamtime, knowing their own Dreaming, and so be a credible witness to original Dreaming. A word that has been too readily misrepresented is Dreamtime. While the translation is a boggy one it is possible to cognise the Dreamtime as simultaneously a time before of Creation and a time and space we could enter into now for a number of purposes. Ideally to maintain Creation. It is never true to say that Ancient Dreamtime and now Dreamtime are the same time in space, obviously when the Dreamtime was is before and in most of all contexts is a record of what happened historically that made us who we are today. The fact that our psychology is genetically encoded by genealogies we are born into is the same as to say that as mature adults we walk in our Ancestors Dreaming. Our psychology is also, in any context, formed by specific behaviour patterns that cause some aspects of Human learning to become more readily used than others among the range of potential patterns accessible from our total genome.

The day following meeting the Convoy, my friend by whose story we had become a part of the Convoy, told me that the old women were going to make it rain coming into Sydney, and that when they said that, it would rain. My nose was somewhat out of joint at this remark. Here was a woman who was a scientist and a Marxist, getting drunk and telling me that rain dances are real. It rained.

The Convoy became divided into two parts on the way into Sydney, I was in the later part that took a wrong turn in Liverpool. We reconverged before La Perouse and there I was introduced to my future and past. I was invited, as one among very few white skinned people, to attend a significant ceremony held overnight on the eve of 26th January 1988. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only person there who arrived outside Aboriginal systems who stayed to accept the entire ceremony through to hear in English words I could understand, words that were a driving force behind the ritual and myself ever since. The flag raising at dawn connected with me in a way I have never been able to ignore. Unbeknown to my Father my presence there altered my entire life. It has been difficult to express to anybody other than who was also there. It was an event that simultaneously blessed myself with gift from those who made it and placed me in a position in which I always felt an intense feeling of obligation to the entire Aborigine people. An Honour I was blessed with of an explicit stated obligation to fulfil. The subsequent march was another march like any other, yet there was Forever between it and the political marches of the Irish militant Republicans I later went on in England and Ireland.

I travelled to England in 1989, with thankfully a vast degree of community knowledge gained by employment as a Community Radio Liason Officer, and the many unusual persons and opinions, and life stories I listened to in that capacity. England had a funny reality of red double decker buses, big black taxi cabs, and a police force with funny hats and old fashioned bicycles that turned out to be exceptionally proficient. Never mind singing detectives, I met a singing bus conductor. I was told in Australia about a famous legal success of left wing street activists campaigning for Peace, and I can verify first hand that, without exception, all who engage in left wing street activism, even including folk who for weekend sport sabotage fox hunts, are exceptionally proficient at managing the Law. I learnt well.

I learnt about the immense importance of forming co-alitions among all groups of people who are being disempowered. There it felt like the edge of civilization by comparison to Australian standards, that is for all people who have not bridged a definite gap in the labour market. A low income was exactly half the equivalent in Australian dollars and fresh fruit and vegetables were four times the equivalent in Australian dollars. A homeless German once told me that in Germany homeless people kept themselves warm by eating well and looking after their places, where there were braziers and friendly faces, whereas in England the only way to cope without a roof was to get drunk. I subsequently observed the accuracy of his statement. The poor in homes in England know that if you can not find common ground amid disagreement and organise on that basis, you rot in a prison of one sort or another. The only even slight desire I have ever felt to return there is to take a friend who could ratify my experience. It was a mediaeval like world, even with more money. I acknowledge the English are remarkable in their ability for insightful and self depreciating humour in backwards conditions, and I praise the Romani culture for seeing me out with safety. My crowning achievement in England was by following Burnam Burnam’s example, placing a Land Rights flag on the 24hr a day picket of the South African Embassy. The non-stop picket against apartheid was a call for the release of Nelson Mandela, and the Land Rights flag was there on the day he was released. Not much but substantial all the same. The whole planet is full of people who would lay claim to Excalibur’s inheritance.

My interest in England was aroused by Marxism. It was a Marxist who pointed me correctly on the track of not needing to fear Aborigines because they are black and we are white and white people oppress black people. Who are you and what is your intention towards black people? There is no need to fear a simple biological difference. Marxists who knew that with the up front statements of their interests, intentions, and investments, they could stand hand in hand with blacks in Australia without fear. It was ultimately Marxist communication on the ground and, and a political win for the Union movement that lead to the first legislated Land Hand Back to the Gurindji People. There is a very basic point that the majority of white and not so white Australians are living here because their people were suffering abhorrent conditions of exploitation and discrimination in their first homelands. We, as descendents of many races were alienated from many homelands. A statement as true of England as of Australia I learnt there. I believe it is a fallacy that there is negative racial discrimination and violence between all those who were and are basically refuges and exiles who immigrated to Australia, and Aborigines. When racially based negative discrimination and violence rears its ugly head on the streets of Australia it can be sourced to the manipulations of the media and politicians by the power possessing wealthy who wish us all to displace our anger with them onto each other. There is a fact that even the legislated negative racial discrimination of apartheid in South Africa was based on the Queensland Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island ACT. These are lessons of a youth by many standards misspent that I can not turn away from. Travel to England was not the kind of lesson I expected, and yet I learnt that in the dearth of decent living conditions of the poor in London there is an element of Human compassion that never runs out. My friends there were of many races and cultures. The only English people I am friends with who know England as the land they belong to and feel able to express their very Englishness openly and honestly without pain, I met here in Australia. Oh, and I saw the grave yard where Karl Marx is buried in England, but I could not afford the grounds keeping fee to enter and see.

One thing I perhaps grew overly fond of in England was the English custom of speaking about anything and everything with complete strangers at a bus stop, though pub conversation is way more restrictive. Perhaps some kind of purdercally English disease I picked up to be able to communicate more fluidly with complete strangers than with friends. Well for all English concerns about going native in the colonies, I think I went native in England because I still find resounding insight in conversing with strangers at bus stops. I can explain that feature of English culture within the context of Aboriginal Kinship, but not any more accurately without Kinship than by saying that the English have a habit of marrying people they hate. It sounds a bit rude put that way so I do prefer to describe Englishness from within an Aboriginal cultural context. My very favourite friend from time in England is Romani and taught me some real home truths about the difference between legal and illegal English culture. To the travellers! Perhaps friendly Englishmen are all travelling to Timbuctu and to ratify their experience within their English culture will write a decent book. There are a few highly decent sorts of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh I know who are settled in Australia.

In England I eventually met a strange drunken Irishman who needed a bed for the night, and the following and, so we wound up living together awhile, nine and a half years all together. The England I knew, the country side with its great variety of dialects of English, and London with its great variety of cultures and subcultures, was a learning time of listening and withholding. I wanted a baby and my original boyfriend who I had met in Canberra and was a British citizen with Australian residence would not. The drunken Irish man did agree to a baby, only outside of wedlock and there we were travelling home via the trans-Siberian railway, the Great Wall of China, and a visit to my mother’s lectures in Japan about landing in trouble with a Catholic.

Hang on, hang on, reel that back a bit. The purdercally English disease is infesting my word. Now, well before I met the Irish fella, well, I was already entangled in a mess with a nasty local English chappie. Not surprising really with an Arthurian song in their land, and yet not so badly as to have prevented me finding what I needed. He insisted that I read John Pilger, and I did; so. He was stating the obvious and got my pilchers in a knot about what is and is not worth talking about. One day I was counting the days income of the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group donations bin on the picket of the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square with an English Public School Radical Left Wing Anti-Apartheid Activist, and I was talking about John Pilgers work when I was recommended another book. A book rather than being by an Australian in London, was by an English fella who went to Central Australia to verifiy an opinion he had been attempting to formulate for many years about nomadic cultural behaviour and hunting. He gave up and wrote “Songlines”. Bruce Chatwin’s accomplishment of deciphering aspects of the Aborigine Cosmological framework to be able to be acceptable to an Englishman’s palate was, thanking the very many who assisted him in his travels, what brought my mind to the certainty that I could never live and procreate, could never know myself, away from Australia. I was returned to my Father and to Australia by reading “Songlines”, and then after that I met the Irish chap.

What a nuiscence the Irish I picked up in England was always putting my head in a muddle about time and space, yet we made three babies here in Australia, each of whose life has never for even an instant been regretted. As much as my head was constantly getting into a muddle, I was straightening it out with off and on, between changing nappies, then making dinner and washing nappies, part time tertiary study. To begin with an Aboriginal studies major. To all who might assert that such degree structures are are not rigorously academic, I might add, what is salt to one student is sugar to another. I found myself able to accurately cognise almost instantaneously what the various anthropologists and linguists wrote and spoke about, when most other students were stewing in the juice of: how on Earth do these people readily cognise the entire of their social unit. Kinship has a fool proof simplicity. Somewhere in between revolt with myself for being with a bloke who couldn’t ring to let me know he would not be coming home for tea, or from the pub, or maintain any feeling of stability for any of my plans in life, I among other things managed to: work in developing and delivery of peer support parenting programmes to young mothers; meet members of the Warlpiri Baptist community through a neighbourhood food co-operative in Canberra; participate with my new born son representing housing co-operatives in establishing a Not For Profit Community Housing Company with a Sir William Kirby-Jones as its Founding Chairperson, (from whom I learn more about consensus decision making than any left wing organisation to my surprise); earnt University units in a wide range of subjects including science; was a card carrying member for a while of the International Socialists; but the children come first and I never qualified for that degree, albeit well earned.

After I separated from the children’s father, I gave up cannabis use. Not that I had been a heavy smoker however had eventually felt as though I had to maintain myself with regular use in order only to tolerate that drunken muddled Irish existence in my company. I must insert here that the muddle of it was never the Irish aspect. Irish culture has been in part what engendered my capacity to cope with a muddle of a drunkard. I experienced a mild episode of mental illness, that was widely over reacted to, particularly by my mother somewhat predictably. The unable to be definitively diagnosed symptoms of mental illness have re-occurred on exactly four occasions that were each decisively less in degree. I at first smoked tobacco. I took it up for the first time in my life at over thirty during the detoxification from cannabis, a process that is at least three months in duration. Thereafter the tobacco was immeasurably more difficult to give up. My episodes of ill health were variously labelled: a dissasociative episode; depression; and a psycosis. With general symptoms listed as being overly anxious, overly inclusive and circumlocative. The fore runner of diagnosis is at present a schizotypal personality. One psychiatrist suggested Qeeg’s syndrome could be the problem, a condition named after the story of Qeeg in Moby Dick. Curiously it was only the Irishman who could agree; though he’ll not agree with any thing since I openly identified with Aboriginality, apparently all and any Aborigine is a danger to them self in his book, and that’ll be his loss. The culmination of these experiences is an intensely and thorough self knowledge and an ability to readily adapt quickly various sets of established cultural norm. If I were to enter into another episode it would manifest only as I don’t want to have to speak to anybody, nor have any further expectations on myself. Mental illness never yet stopped me from cooking dinner or taking the kids to school, though they may have had to wait a day for a new pair of trousers, if I couldn’t manage the shopping centre I wasn’t likely to take them there. You decide for your self about my relative sanity. The worst of the varying diagnoses, made after I was well established in recovery, was schizophrenia with the stated defining symptom being identification with Aboriginality. The clinical diagnosis was withdrawn within five months and even the stigma is rubbing off now.

Along my adventure in getting to know my self in recovering from passing mental health crisis, I re-worked through my earlier studies of Aboriginal Kinship, re-newed my Faith in Aboriginal Cosmology, re-medied a long standing health problem of women’s matters, re-turned to my feeling of being bound by extensive reciprocal obligation from 1988, and only then re-membered Jesus. There was no True Faith without Kinship is the ground on which I recovered. There is no reality in my life without Kinship.

I set out, with my children, on an adventure to return to my home town. There I for the first time, with the blessing of other Aborigines, wrote on an official form that I identify with my Aboriginal heritage. Since my late teenage years I had known that we have some hidden, very well hidden, Aboriginal ancestry, identifiable in photographs and in occasional suggestion and in rare occurance kind of “so, don’t let on” kind of comments. On the day of the opening of the National Museum in Canberra, it suddenly hit me that my children need to know and they are living since then in awareness of. I mentioned it in passing once to a group of friends of many years with Aborigines among who simply remarked they always thought as much. It was kind of no big deal. In fact a surprisingly large number of friends I spoke to during my recovery, when I told them of my Aboriginality said they also had Aboriginal ancestry. Distinctly there is a suprising number of those who knew they had some Aboriginal ancestry among the parents of the children my children made friends with at school. It was as though I discovered openly that I had always lived in this secret club, secret to even many of its members, of those who at heart never believed ourselves to be the invader. We also knew, like we know that the sun shines and the night is dark and stars bright, that we belong to this land Australia, to the places of our conception and birth, we are all uniquely responsible to the Land for our presence on it and can never possess the Earth, and that anyone who associates differently to the question of land tenure is just plainly deficient in intellect. Ownership is responsibility-to-suffer-if-anything-goes-wrong-ship, not an I’ve-got-complete-control-over-all-interactions-on-ship.

Aborigines who identify, I even noted I am not the only with pale skin and red hair, every where were responding to myself with an attitude of “well it is about time.” (A Murri child told me of uncle, who is not a blood relation of hers yet Aborigine all the same who is a cousin of Steve Irwin’s, go on Steve identify, what is your Irwin secret.) Aborigine children on the street in every small country town were showing me by body language that I was beneath their dignity unless I implicitly in my body language was responding to their cultural assertions of a unity in Aboriginality through Kinship. I felt like I had been waiting a long time for my people and culture to find me, and it turned out they were there all around all the time only waiting for me to accept myself as one of their kind. Outside of Kinship it is not able to be understood. Many cultures have their Kinship. Kinship is first and foremost a code of conduct of every Human interaction, how we all our selves regard each other. I guess what is special about Aboriginal Kinship is that it neatly defines all other within it. Anthropologists will quibble over this point, and yes of course Kinship is entirely dependent on place, there are many Aboriginal Kinship patterns. In the year 2000 ceremonies were performed to begin the process of including other folk within Aborigine Kinship systems, alongside Eternity on Sydney Harbour Bridge, and well it is about time.

This path is one I, while being intrinsically committed to, must provide the multitude of warnings about as a path fraught still with all the reasons so many in mainstream white society of Aboriginal heritage will to this day not identify, relatively that is, and why so many black skinned Aborigines need be wary of approaches for cultural exchange. Being in a unique position I can provide warnings of the potential hazards and would like to do so to encourage more white skinned Aborigines to identify with their innate Aboriginality, no matter what culture they outwardly fit within. I am motivated to encourage this not as a means for white skin people to adopt Traditionally Oriented culture but for many Aborigines who are successfully adapted to the invading culture and able to use it to their benefit to begin to show their pathways to black skinned relatives and in general put Aboriginality into more esteemed regard by mainstream Australia. Perhaps people will grow to regard being a descendant of an Aborigine as of higher social standing than being a “First Fleeter”. The totality of what I am about to commence to write falls within the following statement: it was and is the racism of many peoples who have invaded our land that hurt my self and my children in the process of beginning to make tracks towards identifying as the descendents of those Aborigine women who married white farmers to embed within mainstream Australian culture the reciprocity of our Forebears. The racism I experience proves beyond all reasonable doubt that we as a race are singled out for oppression entirely by our prior long standing connection with this our land of birth, and that skin colour becomes irrelevant in the scales of oppression and only relevant in the scales of how many minutes we can stand in the sun without getting burnt. I’d rather be black any day, but that is irrelevant. It was made only more irrelevant by the manner in which I was treated by some of black skin who see fault only with white skin. Where there is a will there is a way, and if not now then when the time is . . .

In my travel I happened to camp for four nights at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. They treated my presence with a wariness I was and am quite accustomed to. I need state that what I experienced there was a polemic beyond belief in the continuing rape and pillage of traditional Aboriginal culture by a younger urbanised “Black skin as power” culture, a cult of sorts that has so swallowed the racism of mainstream Australian predominantly white culture, as to be believing racist lies about themselves and so acting them out. The Black Power movement by which the tent embassy was inspired is a confusing basis for beginning to return to traditional culture if “black” means only skin colour. All to easily young black people take black power to mean with black skin they also might be able to get away with what we accuse those in white skin culture of perpetrating against us. Black Power is not that. It is the power obtained in society by knowing when to give up to a nasty fellas win. The worst I witnessed was a self proclaimed elder of the site saying of re-instating Kinship “We had that idea first” and implying that thereby they, of the tent embassy win. A win against who ever they imagined my team was, a win in terms of money, political power, and their false definition of Kinship as a customary sharing of fault without any code restricting sexual behaviour. They did not like myself, and quite obviously were not able to cognise a true Kinship structure. Kinship is not for winning power, money, fame, it is about a win for your own health. I was not bothered by their rejection of myself as Aborigine, yet was very bothered by their attempt to claim how and what I belong to as theirs.

Having begun here a process of stating facts and associations that people may find difficult, I do need to see this process through to the happy ending I am often enough waking up Dreaming through to. I do follow Aborigine custom of going with the Dream that wakes me up, that is only the exact part of any night time sleeping dreaming that rouses my physical body into movement. I wonder how many at the tent embassy were true to this custom. It is a harder custom to adhere to on heroin, and those who were in adherence I will still call friend enough to be worth a discussion with about what is true Aboriginality and initiation into. Bear with me while I continue to relate a story that shows up where the line between oppressors and oppressed, and debt and credit, becomes blurred. There is resolution.

My ability is in allowing myself to cognise as others can to learn the basis of their habit patterns. I even momentarily let myself accept as valid how it is that evangelical churches cognise objections to racial vilification legislature, and now need assert emphatically that their argument will only make sense when we are all starting from a level playing ground. At present we are not. It is an example only of an awareness that few are able to maintain, and that can reconcile polemics within culture by broadly inclusive thought. I am able to perceive a social structure in which those fabulously wealthy evangelical preachers could have been able to work to achieve the same goal as my Marxist anti-religion paper selling friends. Perhaps even without perceiving themselves on the same team. But when they go to war and say it is for God we can’t be on the same team in any game. A Priest at University of Canberra spoke to a student gathering that Christians on campus need be tolerant of the student activists because their intentions are as good as any, and my sympathy always was more with the Priest than with a student activists who might state their individual opinion as more relevant to the student community. Is it going to be easy for my socialist friends to call betrayal?

I have no pride what so ever in my behaviour during the four days from 29th December to 2nd January 2003 at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the Lawns of Parliament the Old Parliament House in Canberra. There were rapes, drugs and bashings at that place, and my children were present. I deserved the outcome of having my children temporarily removed from me to be able to rest and recover in a psychiatric health care unit from what I was exposed to there. Though my parents may have been right to remove my children there was no rightness in the fact that people thereafter decided my assertion of Aboriginality was a symptom of a mental illness so sever that I would not be able to look after them ever again. The Irish drunkard who lays claim to Fathering them, took advantage of the circumstance in colluding with a lie spun by the tent embassy site organiser to my mother. I am now in September 2004 engaged in a Family Court Battle that began in May 2003, for residency of my children. Their father has done nothing short of claiming that because I stated Aboriginal heritage my mother refuted I must be a danger to the community, to myself, and a paedophile. His assertions are absurd and I am going to win in court because to maintain his case the he has had to lie through his teeth in a way that can be refuted with on paper evidence from government departments. That is when Legal Aid sees fit to grant aid in the case of a white person of white culture and possible, as yet unrecorded on paper, Aboriginal ancestry and when Lawyers stop loosing critical documents. If I was not already in the category of experienced at dealing with mental health crisis I would be sectioned permanently by now. There was not a conspiracy, only misinformation and slackness on the part of those with clerical duties. Soon all the research I have been forced to accommodate in my daily life in Family Law will begin to bear fruit. The children’s dad wants to take them back to Ireland and without my agreement it’s just plainly as illegal as was his refusal to allow access. There couldn’t possibly be evidence that people are too afraid to hear my case straight because I could prove that stolen generations were all about an ancient ancestry and Land ties not about parenting practises and not about shades of brown. Can I prove that? I did hope to be able to prove that racial violence in Australia is all about an unchecked fear of the traditional system of land tenure, and not about skin colour, if not in court then certainly by making known the difficulties many people face in dealing with me. The critical legal issue for every Australian is that for 200 years Terra Nullius was written into Australian Law and in that context it was illegal to administer Christian teaching and Law based in Kahbalah. Obviously they had to overturn Terra Nullius to be able to exert the influence of English Christian based Law over Aborigines, because if we weren’t Human then their Laws couldn’t apply. The overt behaviour at the tent embassy supporting my ex-partners case that I exposed my children to risk prevented the court case being a land mark case for stolen generations. The tent embassy openly branded me as an oppressor and therefore a child abuser whose children should be removed for three black skin children to return to their mother. Such did not happen. Ironically in my path I met a young white skinned, red haired Aborigine woman, in Glenn Innes at their keeping place, whose children were like mine being removed by cause of the significance of her Aboriginality to her being taken as a mental illness. I talked her through the strategy for a legal win and put her onto the good psychiatrist I was travelling to see. I need face every day the emotional hurt to my children caused by my attendance at the tent embassy.

My son who previously exemplified fair play, now asks why since in maths two negatives make a positive, does not two wrongs make a right. It is all about what your behaviour determines what you deserve in life is the best I can reply. In fact I know that and eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is not a child’s game of tit for tat as the tent embassy seemed to suppose. Never mind that my ancestry was entirely stolen from me and generations of my forebears, and I earned it back by my own hands. They wanted to argue that it was OK for my children to get stolen to make up for black skinned children having been stolen. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth does not mean if you take my wealth I will fight to the death for it back now when I want. It does mean that if something about the weight of a hand and belonging to my self by my hard labours in earning it, is being used to your advantage over mine, then you owe me about the weight of a hand, no less, and no more. A religious law illegally enforced for two hundred years on a whole race of nomads is worth about, . . . well whatever it is worth is somewhat irrelevant to anybody at the tent embassy obviously.

Aborigines are an intrinsically religious people. As a Marxist this would seem an impossible statement to make, and yet to my self not at all. When a religion is a stable basis for belief structure, no more and no less, of course we are all in need of religious belief. Karl Marx wrote from within Judaic culture, and he wrote without anti-Semitism, that capitalism is the mode of production of that culture. What is the Kabalah of the New Testament, because there are all too many who profess Christian Religion who do not believe in Jesus. Aborigine Christians do. I depend on a very specific definition of religion as the entire belief structure that maintains your Faith in Life and Continuing Life. Marxism is functionally a better grounded religion than is Christianity to someone who does not believe in Jesus. There are many aspects of modern religious instruction that lead to misinterpretations about the genuine nature of religious belief to those who adhere to a different belief structure. If we think in terms of numbers, God is One, Absolute, without whom there is no other. Number one is an absolute number that in and of the fact of being conceptualised as a number defines all other numbers. There are a great many people in modern society who do not ascribe to any organised religious belief and yet believe in Life Everlasting. They in general are scientists. When I studied Biology, I marvelled at the wonder of the Human anatomy and physiology on a cellular level. There are so many aspects of the maintenance of a Human carnal body on that level that modern science has yet to discover. Constant occurrences within our cells to maintain Human metabolism in homeostatis, would, if observed occurring to our whole community, as cells of organic life maintaining a homeostasis on the planet Earth, would be called miraculous. Scientists regularly observe such phenomena on a micro level with marvel and wonder and gratitude for being alive. I wonder about my physical organism on a micro level and what alterations occurred in maintaining my homeostasis that enabled re-entering the Christian fold only through being able to cognise God’s work within a Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal Cosmology.

The key for my self is and always was Kinship. Aboriginality is all about never doubting Kinship. Kinship teaching that adheres to the same basic premises as that taught through the Talmud, Islamic teaching, and embedded within the Holy Bible, and in the Mahabarata and other Ancient Work, needed to be accessible to Aborigines in the invading culture before they could accept the new culture. I believe this is why those Aborigines who maintain the most fluent cross cultural communication are those for whom a good grounding in Christian theology and practise was provided, and provided in reciprocal exchange for teaching to the missionaries about Aborigine Kinship. The whole of any song cycle revolves around Kinship. From an Aboriginal point of view it is easy to notice that while the invading culture brought disease etc, it also brought an exceptionally valuable song cycle in the form of the Holy Bible. It is worth studying the process of the establishment of Christianity in an Aboriginal community through the story of Elco Island, well known as the home of Yothu Yindi. With any acceptance of a Christian belief structure by any Aborigine, there is the implicit placement of their Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal Cosmology within the Euro-centric definition of a Religion.

To define Religion it is important to be distinct from a religious doctrine, direct teaching, or dogma. There are many among my friends who reject all non-Eurocentric scientifically based study of the miniscule as superstition unable to be scientifically substantiated. Then again the definition of superstition includes fear of God, and I guess those who would ram down throat of a self proclaimed scientist that they will be in trouble unless they believe in any religious doctrine unable to be mathematically expounded, are, in a way only afraid of the consequences to Humanity of the separation of science from religion. A Fear of God’s wrath from, for example genetic engineering is readily able to be expounded. I read some where about genetic engineering of strawberries in California to make them grow fatter, altering rainfall. A scientifically recorded and evidenced phenomenon. Any one who doesn’t believe me can do their own research. What about the bee farmer who worked with scientists developing tiny radio transmitters to find out how it came to be that his bees honey was tasting like the bees were collecting pollen from plants well outside of their range of flight? Well it turned out that the bees from one colony were catching freight trains there and back again every day. No body could sustain an argument that scientists are not at the fore front of marvelling at God’s Labour of maintaining homeostasis on Earth. We didn’t do teaching bees to catch a train did we? Neither could we argue that there are not manifold ills in modern science in the development of technologies that try to imitate God. How many towers of Babel will it take? Can you as a Christian accept I would state categorically that all of modern science and technology is in and of itself a Religion with Faith. So why could I not reconcile my mother’s Christian teaching with my Father’s Science without a Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal Cosmological framework? I say again that the answer is Kinship.

My Father talked to me about a phenomena called Major Histo-compatibility Complex. It is a discovery of immuno-geneticists on a cellular level that totally verifies the importance of extra-matri-moiety marriages within all Kinship structures as increasing the variety that one single Human organism can sustain of immune system anti-bodies. Now when the tent embassy asserted such as their finding, I had to laugh since they were in breach of Kinship Law, but when the began openly flaunting such, ironically by claiming to be working with white skin people, and attempted to force sexual breaches of Kinship Law on to young Aborigines, it was not funny for long. The kind of inordinately obviously contradictory cogniscence that leads to such behaviour is, as far as I can scientifically verify, caused by the immense lack of variety of antibodies to all sorts of cellular invaders of our bodies, that in turn is caused be intra-moiety sexual liaisons. We all need Kinship and Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal Communities have the best maintained Kinship structures on God’s Earth.

I explained to my son that two wrongs don’t make a right even though in mathematics two negatives make a positive with the illustration of magnets. Push the two negative poles together and they repel, like two people who want to fight over who is in debt to who. With magnets one of them flips around and only then is a stronger positive force obtained. A hand for a hand, and eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, is about natural justice, inevitably, and eventually occurring. That magnet just turns around. I also explained to my son that basically numbers are an abstraction by ourselves of reality, a representation of reality with one less dimension represented than reality is of, well how else could two negatives make a positive? Without cogniscence that one is absolute and the Absolute Oneness of God there would be nothing for theorising relatively about. This is the essential piece that many mathematicians miss, and good on Stephen Hawking his multitude of attempts to communicate an unusually formed cogniscence, I Hope he makes it an asset to Humanity. Yet what has he proven did he put together oneness with relativity? We need to recall our self is not God to make sense of number. Why is it that for Aborigines to cognise such commonplace and not to the same extent for non-Aborigines? Is there any wonder so many folk are confused in their Faith when events like Hiroshima did occur. To know that life exists in a perpetual cycle does reinstate true Faith, from alpha to omega we renew our lives in cycle with the Earth’s orbit around Sun. Are we needing to experience dying to know God? What is knowably pleasant really without a painful contrast. For better or for worse, until death do us part and all that. The following is expressions of some of the words I awoke by:
You can never imagine you own way to die
With death be sure
With nature how you live is how you die
While sometimes not even my Father can protect me from the cult that is modern social fabric, God can.
You only do yourself.
Perhaps Stephen Hawking is best placed to put a mathematical formula to such an awakening, prefaced only be by the Lords Prayer, to know God’s Labour is constant that I might live. I think it is only my muscles that are more intelligent than Mr. Hawking. Well, in fact, I think my son is also, by highlighting the need for these statements, he highlights the need for a mathematical definition of God’s Laws for living by. Will it really require a mathematical version of the Lord’s Prayer to make Reconciliation with Mr. Hawking’s mathematical equivalent of creation known. Could Mathematics ever prove Purgatory? Nah, only Saints and Buddas do that, ones who don’t worship graven idols, unless, . . . what about that un-understandable zero? I get it Mr. Hawking, can you get what I get? Is zero relative? When your self imagines a future it is only then able to imagine time in reverse while returning cogniscence to now. Did Mr. Hawking notice that? Is infinity minus one worse that infinity plus one? What odd questions, yet it was One Thousand and One Arabian Nights that gave Sherezade Her life eternal, never nine hundred and ninety nine. Should abortion be illegal? I better return to the subject that is more obvious as related to Reconciliation than having a thing or two or three or four to say about black holes and the like. And abortion is as abortion does, and Mr. Hawking’s maths can not be simply only a definitive mathematical proof that God is; because our smart mathematical selves do not define creation, only endure it’s pain without complaint. Each our Soul Will know in death what we do never define for fear unto our self. I wonder whether Mr. Hawking and other mathematicians would care to read about Aboriginal Language structure, because I am sure the expression enabled by such is rather more like a mathematical equation than is enabled by other languages. Australian Aboriginal languages are renown for being unique in all the world in sentence structure. Perhaps better that Aborigines uniquely calculate the maths in Aboriginal language with restrictions of the four numbers one, two, three, and many, because we don’t want infinity calculations to be of rabbit population. My son was almightily relieved to be corrected in the false application of mathematical equations to Human trespasses.

I am Hoping many of you are able to follow my line of thinking. If not immediately, then do not summarily dismiss it. These are hard concepts to grapple with from within a euro-centric mindset, and it is hard use of English for users of Aboriginal English. Please read these words over, be critical of what I write, and do your own research to verify beyond all reasonable doubt that there is cause for my questioning, what I write is correct in every respect, and why I question is never to remove good cultural bounds, only those tricks of cogniscence that have us imagining cult behaviour is culture.

About what happened to my self at the tent embassy for the lingeringly over-curious in readership. I was accepted as Aborigine during the entirety of my interactions there. I knew that they knew one among them was breaking Kinship Law by continual sexual interactions with men who were brother by skin. It was openly described to me that such people live at the tent embassy because no other Aboriginal community will have them. Two men there had sexual interactions with myself statedly to confirm my Aboriginality, I knew there are better ways to assess such and was too compromised already to object. They did confirm my Aboriginality. Thereafter the tent embassy site organiser reported to my mother that I am not Aborigine and was fucked up being there, defiling their culture and sacred Law. Those who stated such knew they were lying and describing only themselves. The drunken Irishman knew they were lying. My children will be returned, and one day my mother may be able to retrieve the old Family photo album, and have another look for birth certificates. She did tell me she found a marriage certificate that said Aboriginal, albeit an illegal marriage certificate in that case. How many are we for whom there are no records within written Law?

My belief is that there is a vast number of urban dwelling Aboriginal people who are in a kind of city life akin to black forest dwelling, and are unable to maintain a basic cultural identity, are unable to maintain a basic kinship unit by the quantity and quality of racial stereotyping they are subject to early in life. They seek the sacred knowledge of traditionally oriented elders and those in traditionally oriented kinship units will not divulge such to youth miss spent by drug abuse. Let me in fact broaden the expression drug abuse to include food substances belonging to any sacred Dreaming of the song line you are conceived and born on as an Aborigine. For example I can not eat Snake, nor in fact any herd animal meat, or even wheat or milk by cogniscence of the basis of this Law and it’s impact on myself as a white skin person. All such foods fall within the category of forbidden to myself, a nungarrayi skin, within Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal Law, and whose ancestors married into European agriculture. So there I was at the tent embassy, listening to descriptions of the Woman whose resting place is between Mount Ainslie and Capital Hill, she is visible sometimes there if you know what to look for, eating root vegetable soup from my own supplies of home dried root vegetables, which I embarrassed my self entirely with by spilling it into and around the fire. Was it any wonder that an angry black skinned woman, who is outcast even in her own tribe by her behaviour, and attempting to claim fame through the tent embassy, did become envious of myself, as a white woman, who grew up within the nice white middle class mainstream cultural paradigm, that seemingly to an outsider never ostracises its offspring for what goes on in the bedroom, and accused me of stealing her culture. I spilt my soup and performed a traditional dance and was then described by her as defiling her culture. I shamelessly say that my dance is true, and I did cognise Aboriginality substantially better than herself, and it had been the only identity she had, and a severely damaged identity at that. It is no wonder she accused me of guilt by white skin alone of every perversion white culture has brought to Australia. So what began for me as an approach through the tent embassy to the entirety of Aboriginal Australia, who they claim to represent, with an offer of beginning reciprocal flow back into Aborigine Kinship in the area of health, became myself being abused by people stealing from me what I had rightfully earned of a path for my children for returning into traditionally oriented culture. They used the manner in which they abused me to claim my life story as the tent embassy’s to falsify to Traditionally Oriented Communities that the tent embassy was being an adequate representative to Parliament, Police, and Tourists of the entirety of Aboriginal endeavour to maintain Kinship. They could not cognise my life story without using a claim on being oppressed by my presence to further their heroin dealing nearby. I can only assume every continuation of their behaviour with knowledge of its fault, was caused by too great a fear of anybody finding out what they were up to in colluding with an illegal drug supply avenue. I my self make no sense to angry young black men and women who have been socialised all their life by mainstream society, often including schooling, for going straight to gaol. There are many among who could have been my friends, and were in fact briefly, yet could not explain to their immediate black neighbourhood why they liked me, and felt true with me. The long and the short of it is that: it has consistently been that, among urban Aborigines, those who, despite the extensive abuses of trust of the churches to their people, are maintaining Faith in Jesus, are many of those who are able to perceive my life story without becoming angry. Out bush, well that is another story belonging in another language. These are some of the hard cold facts and few are able to appreciate. Among urbanised Aborigines in the East of Australia there was a political rift caused by the tent embassy, and similar politicking learnt in interaction with white communities, by methods in effect supporting white culture as the superior to Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal. It has been young black skinned Aborigines who suffered a whole new layer of their culture being stolen by those who fostered imagination that they could make good by taking drugs for access to political power.

I have a great deal of sympathy for all Aborigines who lost their languages due to the Australian Governing official’s policies. I also find an Aboriginal dialect of English more proficient. Yet I am seemingly all too often abused by other speakers of. To those urban Aborigines who think my life is easy because it’s whatever it is they imagine is whiter, one fella imagined such to be an excuse to lounge in front of the TV and get a DVD player, I say: It is not an easy road to take to marry into whatever it is that white culture is, and adopt it as an Aborigine, with or without identifying as an Aborigine. White social structures are built around a context in which some folk only want to rip others off and other folk need protecting from. White society felt like pushing shit uphill without return, only and excepting the fact that I am a mother and my children need to feel Love, and I would walk to Kingdom come to protect them. In motherhood and in no other way was my experience in white society positive. I made a great effort to extract the best of mainstream white Australian enculturation habits and socialisation patterns for my children. There are many decent parenting standards in white society worthy of cross cultural investigation by Aborigines who need their traditionally oriented parenting standards ratified by mainstream white culture because there is common ground. There are tried and true methods for gaining respectable acceptance of the real worth of Aboriginal parenting practises within mainstream white Australia through the court system. I say this is work for Aborigines only because always it is those who are working hardest to prevent exploitation of themselves by others who provide solutions for those others. It would be an excellent anthropological task to develop a legal dogma for cross cultural family report writing. There is also a great amount of valuable work to be done in researching the impact Aboriginal Language structures have had on standard English usage in Australia. Interestingly a larger proportion of Australians speak Queen’s English than of British subjects. Where is the common ground between Aboriginal dialects of English and Standard Australian English that enables my self to not take slight from verbal abuse on the street by young black Aborigines about my white skin. Any level playing ground need begin to be asserted by communication in word as well as body language. Aborigines are not afraid of Pauline Hanson, one unique person, because her body language is relatively easily read, yet are afraid by her words that have been twisted by other politicians and the media. My vote goes with Labour, yet I needed to voice opinion against the tent embassy. In Aboriginal English it is more readily possible to express one’s self without being taken for a racist.

After deciding I wanted no further associations with the tent embassy in the first week of February 2003, I met a young Bundjalung Goorie who I felt an immediate close bond with. We thought alike. We both had the same exact gripe with the tent embassy. Although other men and women around him contrived to force him to unnecessarily fear ongoing relations with me and so in their own expression locked him to the tent embassy site – “how could he want her she’s white?” - I have been, in Dreaming, with Him since, not a night has passed without Dreaming him. We met in nobility of Spirit that enabled a true feeling of a permanent connection to commence and he features in my Dreaming now for ever since. Maybe he’ll find me again. I couldn’t afford to go back for him because I had my children to count for. I went to visit the children and arrange their return to me and there after found myself experiencing a seemingly endless nightmare about the tent embassy. My children were experiencing nightmares about there. It was a nightmare strangely heightened by the appearance of a ski lift to the top of a ski run on the steps of old Parliament House. I wondered what had been the effect of visiting the tent embassy on our psychology, and I began to write, vast quantities before desiring to inform other folk of this my form of thought.

I did travel back to Canberra to assess for my self, by physical presence, that what I believed was occurring at the tent embassy was in fact occurring, and I had my nose broken in consequence. I travelled back there via calling in on a former Aboriginal Mission, the mish, at Tabulam, is called Rio. When driving into Rio it is intrinsically important to establish your safety there by going around the far side of their tree, a cultural common law rule more important that staying on the sealed road there, that is if you can find the turn off, not quite a platform nine and three quarters but might as well be. In fact I found it quite impossible to find any route through there other than that which I had been shown in their township, passages of travel were in general not delineated by road. I found there that it was already too late to rescue the young Goorie I was in Love with, called Raymond Hickling, from himself at the tent embassy. He would need rescuing from exposure to speed use, so his uncle had previously warned me, and well I’ve got kids to care for not a life story that can accommodate folk with a problem like desire for speed. Yet these nightmares were not going to stop without an active part for Reconciliation, and I wrote, and I wrote and I wrote, I wrote to Raymond at the tent embassy, and I wrote, and I eventually (re)turned my pen to Family Law with much better results. You see, it was as soon as I knew to let go of a young Goorie Love in good Faith, that the old drunken Irishman decided to remove even access to my children from me. In his affidavits he was/is quite shockingly prejudiced against any Aborigine, and any black skinned person, all from a person I met on the picket of the South African Embassy in London. To kick the boot in, in 1995 his present partner said of a child who was sexually assaulted, “you never know it might be good for him” and I threw her out of my house. I must say my mental health became seriously challenged under their constant pressure. They have been teaching my children from a point of view that black skin equates with dearth of ability, until all the facts are known in court that is. Writing for court was the only way to pull myself out of a serious mental health crisis. I guess I will explain it to my children only that if they were a character in a video game they would be owed a life, or few.

Now I guess my reflections on this whole, might I call it a purdercally circumstance, (or want it be somewhat more abterse?) are in general of the, - don’t forget about Real Reconciliation - kind. It is easier to find fault with race relations today than to offer solutions. One day I was at home in Brisbane’s West End, and wondering where to find and Aboriginal Christian congregation, and an Aborigine Jehovah’s Witness just knocked on my door, out of no where it would seem, and reminded me that Jesus is the son. In the name of the Father and of the Son and in the name of the Holy Ghost, I do state, before anybody gets out their gun, there was a problem with an internal polemic within Aborigine communities, some within those communities described it as a “mission mentality” and others as “want white”, and I can categorically state that all such problems were originally those of other cultures, we are not a people who tolerate any polemic within.

For many years after Songlines brought me home from England and other travelling, I absorbed myself in wonderment about the distinctive nature of Australian Multiculturalism in contrast to the cultural contexts in which folk of different cultures interact in other parts of our world. It continues to regularly strike me that when we focus on our differences we expose our similarities and when we focus on our similarities we expose our differences. For example, Australians do not like “a tall poppy”, well supposedly. We are, on the whole, a nation of aspirers of each to their own, in wealth, you reap as you sow. To the English their Great Levellers uprising of 1649 etc, it makes a good song, but we’ve got the real thing out here mate. The Southern Cross and all that. Yeah, that’s right, were all the bloody same, got two good hands, use them. It’s our good old fair dinkum Aussie levelling attitude that if fact sees us through Olympics in which a record number of gold medals are won, so hooray for us; only, that’s not the whole story. You’ve got two good eyes, 20/20 like mine, so conceptualise your life as I do because we’ve all got the same bottom line? Who would swallow that? Yet we expect it of every single immigrant. You’re Australian now so speak English! When there is an expectation that everybody will think alike the culture is no longer stable. When those whose ethnic origins caused their entire mind set to be established with different stories as their basis are expected to interact on a daily basis without displaying belief in their culture of origin we are demonstrably causing cult behaviour. A multicultural society needs intrinsically an underpinning of a larger looser culture in which there are individuals who are able to unify the belief structures of a number of cultures. I was for a substantial time home schooling my children and we revolved our social studies around looking for evidence within the children’s sections of public libraries of stories from different cultures that are built to the same intrinsic skeletal storyline structure. For example there are always to be found stories of the small being victorious in battle over the mighty of identical structure. People in general are loosing sight of the fact that the dominant cultural paradigm in which we relate is established by a story cycle we all agree upon. We do not want the tall poppy syndrome to become an Australian story about the failings of fame, but a story we all agree upon about how to avoid the weaknesses of fame.

We can all in our education systems look for all those stories that can be used to create a cross cultural paradigm. Begin with Genesis of the Bible for providence of basis for sound culture, the Holy Bible is a tried and true cross cultural song cycle. Another valid example is Dr. Seuss’s Book, The Lorax. For children it establishes a story that things can go wrong with industrialisation, unless . . . .. There unfortunately exist among us all too many thneed hungry, yet that one small word unless has always been there for me since early childhood in the face of potential disaster. I knew with the absolute certainty of a child’s faith in God, that even the seed hungry would leave a seed of Hope for me. When I was a young child I believed, Truly Believed, I needed to acquire the items with which to purchase that last Truffula seed from the old Onceler. I worried a lot about where to get the shell of a great great great grandfather snail, until one crawled along. It was not until many years later I read about Pandora; and of Genesis, well wasn’t I alive always in constant belief of God’s creation? Even as a Marxist? How else was Mr. Hawking’s work understandable.

I read a large quantity of esoteric teaching of a Sufi Moslem origin, and this was the beginning of my reintegration of Marxism as a cultural base, Science as a cultural base, and Christianity as a cultural base. The Koran and Islamic thought provide the essential structure to understand resurrection as a scientifically possible phenomena. All of Islamic Faith accept Jesus as a Saint and Prophet. Mohammed’s teaching was better suited to the cogniscence of those he was contemporary with than earlier teaching in the same tradition, of which Jesus was a part. Islamic teaching is a good supplement to the words needed at the time of Jesus. By maintaining an enduring understanding within culture, of the difference between a politician and a prophet we enable God’s teaching to be transmitted in more detail. Mohammed was a Saint and a Prophet of Great lineage and Tradition in whose teaching my True Faith and Hope were rekindled. I would not my self be able to provide an irrefutable systematic definition of the difference between a prophet and a politician without Islam. I also understand Dharma defined within Buddhist school of thought a simile of True Faith in God our only creator, including Law for living by God’s Will on Earth. Why was it not until I returned within a Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal Cosmology that I was able to cognise Jesus in Crucifixion as the Son of God, and make Christianity of my infancy my own in Faith. I write in Hope others will also, and I will read their writings regardless of whether they outwardly profess the exact same Faith in every detail.

Aborigine Kinship systems were maintained in part with terror of retribution for breaking Law. An example of a sever penalty is being murdered for any sexual liaison between a son-in-Law and a mother-in-Law. For those who did break sacred trust between brother and sister there was the worse penalty of being entirely ostracised from all culture and Human contact, especially in desert communities that maintain strong Kinship systems to this day. Islamic Faith in some contexts also condones mercy killings. Is it wrong to murder, and swallow entirely your sin therein, in the knowledge that the individual you kill is in need of the mercy of somebody preventing them from hurting further than such, because they have become without the ability to accept their sins? A cause for ostracising? How came it to be we are living in a culture in which folk believe they can get away with murder? What is the circumstance in which a life of disease is spared? What are the footprints we will make for Reconciliation? Why are people in modern society eating the dirt of self hate? Ask these questions and others, it is right to ask. I know that within my culture Human nature is known to be one of abhorrence of murder. Part of my Dreaming is of my self as Eve falling from Paradise during droughts by killing to eat. The Southern Cross Dreamtime Mythology is inimical with Humanity being expelled from the Garden of Eden. We live in a culture only the fringes of which teach that meat for food is harmful by causing a kill to live mentality. My son Dream that to eat meat in a circumstance of mutual obligation with those who do, is only possible without sin by pooing out the entirety of any nutrients obtained from. Those nutrients released with the death of a roo are of the sun and the moon and the stars and the Earth for the goodness within to return from whence it came. Do I fit in to Aboriginal culture, I hear they eat a lot of meat in traditionally oriented communities, and yet the Dreamtime story of the Southern Cross was what converted my mind to be remembering that even the tiniest loss of life to any other sensitive creature is a sin. All the Buddha’s in the world could not convince me like the Southern Cross story did.

Why is it as people with Eurocentric cultures we are doubtful about our own racial origins as white skinned people and the cultural origins of our ethnicity that are embedded in myth, why don’t we believe that the stories we are taught as children are real? Do I question too rhetorically? I believed the Brother’s Grimm from when I first could read them, and I hope my children also can, there is enough German ethnicity in them to need to. Often within the cultural traditions including Middle Eastern hermetic decoding, that are the basis of many of our legislated social structures, we fail to accept allegorical readings for true allegory. Often unable to be accepted on face value, yet never-the-less true. Aborigine Creationism is likewise taught allegorically and in order to accept the teaching, the actual allegory needs to be believed. If we can not believe the face value we should not apply the number game in the story to our selves. How far Will I Believe? Hope springs eternal from that which you can believe well, and far be it from me to encourage any other Soul to believe as I can. Believe what You Will. Byame did turn us into animals to force upon us acceptance that there was too much animal behaviour among us. What then? God did reject Eve from the Garden of Eden because there was too much snakes mind in her after eating forbidden fruit. How could we function in society without believing in its basic premises? Only possible when the social fabric has become a cult. A cult of worshipping the shopping? Lets Hope for better, I for one would prefer a cult of religious intolerance of anything other than that which is irrefutably scientifically proven, to a cult of money love. Aborigines are exceptionally good at refraining in an instant from being of animal mind. Religion is what distinguishes a Culture of Healthy Human Life from cult. Modern Science has beauty in the Religious simplicity of questioning what really happened when God created us. How was it exactly down to each molecule, atom and even minuter particle that God made Man, and, in exactly what order was the sequencing of evolution, down to the molecule, within each of the seven days of creation? I think God needs us to study science and hope to raise my three children to study science/law and theology at a tertiary level, within a healthy human culture of true Faith in our best stories.

Try abstracting to accept how insidiously it is to not believe in a Creation Myth. A creation myth that you can not actually, in fact, define exactly, yet are constantly experiencing. It can only have been God – one central Absolute unity of Being who made the “Big Bang”, or whatever part of science it is that you best cognise the creation of your existence by. Only suppose that in a game of Mario on the Nintendo video game machine, that Mario was not believing the starting story and convinced himself, for example, that he needed to defile Princess Peach, or become Princess Peach, or even ignore Princess Peach, instead of rescuing Her. Would he be any better than a slab of concrete in whomp’s world? Surely no body would play the game on those terms. Simply because: the game is established to rescue Princess Peach. An allegorical way to remind us that life on Earth is established with Human purpose. There is no sense in playing “Mario” without an imaginative stretch to perceiving yourself as a dude with a Princess to rescue, and many enemies to defeat to accomplish such rescue. What is this game of each moment we live through established for? To continue a theme of video game as allegory, is there a world outside of prison camps in which refugees who follow the teachings of John the Baptist are framed within inside our culture? I make a space for such frames in my life and sure as eggs have met people to fill those frames. I live in a frame in which any exposer of adult sexual behaviour to any children is able to be discredited, and I am fortunate in the Marker name that provided that frame. Do we encounter an experience because we have found a frame for it within our culture, that is, within our knowable world. Could it be that there is a world frame in which it is explainable and plain that there is only limited space on a planet for folk with the cogniscence of somebody like Stephen Hawking without the rest of us going dumb, and so such cogniscence needs to be withheld be those best able to use such for Human good. I did not want the atomic bomb, and any Human use for digging up uranium is a blacked out frame in my brain. Attempting to cognise by supposing video games are life is a useful allegorical base by the obvious separating of a flat plane from three dimensional life. It helps children to associate accurately. When white skinned people arrived in Australia it was as though a whole new frame for video games opened; many in fact, and many were not compatible with indigenous culture. A “Faith in Jesus” world frame is. It is even though it was illegally applied by the invaders. Their Terra Nullius frame included not to put an awareness of God into as Law. I plan to purchase a piece of land and name it Terra Nullius in new definition of a place in my culture for any who would not follow Biblical Law, there’ll be a deserted picnic bench for food fights. Maybe it’ll have stretch of road and I’ll put an old shoebox in the middle of it to warn strangers of the danger. Perhaps it will function like that scary place Yoda took Luke Skywalker to. A video game is quite like a line in its travel, and yet all contained within a screen with a frame around it. It’s all only an imaginary game in the end. Why then do I assert that while “Mario” is ultimately not to be believed as other than a commercial venture by the Nintendo company, Jesus is and that the frame of the Holy Bible is permanent and enduring? Maybe I am advocating believing in a little dude dressed in red and blue who rescues some Princess of some Land or other. In the end perhaps it will be the immigrants who have settled in Australia and who originated in cultures (i.e. worlds framed as a game on screen to us outside their culture) that are yet more connected with the land of their ancestors than many other immigrants have been, and who are first to recognise and adequately reward and trade with the immense value within Traditionally Oriented Aborigine Communities. Many, many Aborigines have staked hearts on enough folk within the new cultural paradigm of mainstream white Australia being true from even before those ships landed, especially when sacred ceremonies are performed. For example the Rom enacted that made a place for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies within the culture of those who enacted that ceremony. AIATSIS is the best place to begin researching why, how and with what the Yolgnu Mission remains as success to this day whereas the Bundjalung Mission at Tabulam was not. Rio, Tabulam, NSW, Australia is a screen for a world with an exceedingly difficult starting story to recognise and play to.

I guess part of my purpose is to explain to a mainstream Christian Culture that, there is not much beyond the Holy Bible and Dr Seuss we have given those in whose ancestors footprints we all stand. I know my own ethnic origins to be inordinately varied. I guess there are many young Australians growing up in circumstances of struggle between the cultural extremes they are exposed to even within a single nuclear family. I want to be able to establish that there is no need to look at skin colour to regard the difficulties of multiculturalism, and that to focus on skin colour actually minimises the various differences in experiences caused by differing biological features. These are all burning issues facing modern society, issues we need to resolve work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent other environmental disaster. Can we even begin to heal the planet without a good starting story of Human defeat over evil, whether it be Genesis of the Bible, the successes of the Paris Commune, or the simple fact that we’ve got the same genome as a worm for knowing which end of our digestive tract is a mouth and which is an anus. Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal Culture is exemplary at maintaining the heart story of their origins and likewise provide exemplary adherence to Christianity. There is much to learn from Aborigines, but not until we can trade equitably by providing what they need, the keys to Euro-centric culture. Number one fact of being within a Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal Culture is not to divulge our secret teaching without equitable returns guaranteed.

To black skinned friends and other relations, that we know is us all Aborigine, I would warn; do not be fooled by the externally manifesting attitudes of a white skinned dominant cultural paradigm, especially of those who appear to know it all, white skinned folk too are more than they would seem. Pretending to know-it-all is a protection tactic in white society that many decent folk use as well as other less decent folk. Within white culture those who are in full self knowledge and of great ability need to hide within a front of acting like they are only pretending to know it all. Taking white skin as anything less than more than what it seems from within an Aborigine Cosmological point of view, leads directly into drug abuse and other signs of cultural distress. Ask yourselves only of white folk who wish to help, when is more truly less. Those who maintain well the strength of culture that is Aboriginality are to be eminently congratulated. To white skinned folk I say that when we walk by will alone rather than by fault of body, we engender in ourselves the tools with which to engage in reciprocal trade of cultural viewpoints and enrich our own lives. Many more of us may yet, by true Hope of endeavours begun, be blessed with exchanging True Work of God’s Labour enacted through Human lives for an Ancient Cosmological World View in which there is no need for distinction between science and religion. Listen to those Aborigines you come in contact with, listen to the tone within the all often inadequate verbal expressions of the English usage they were given when forbidden from speaking original languages, listen to what we truly represent. It is not racist to paraphrase a black next door neighbour directly to their face by saying “a white fellow would use these words ‘. . .’ to tell a prospective employer that”. It is not implying black people are unintelligent for not being able to rely on their own familiar language usage in every context, it is offering a key for communicating in white culture, a key they may not have encountered yet. Black and white alike, when you go for that job accept the situation as your inspection of whither you would lower yourself to accept the work place relations they have to offer.

I believe there is no other Reconciliation than finding Love, Finding Love in Christ, finding Love in Family, Finding Love in Buddha, Finding Love in Torah, Mahabarata and Koran. Traditionally Oriented Kinship units exemplify this in their cross cultural communication. Jesus is an idea for all to imitate as well as a True historical figure who was born within the same bloodline as some of those who invaded Australia, Byame is also a similar idea and figure. I believe that the vast majority of Australians want genuine Reconciliation and an end to racial violence. Is it time for Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal Cosmology to be accepted as a distinct religion. In light of my very recent experience I fear the circumstance can have got no worse before needfully urgently beginning to become better, yet I continue to feel strongly that in recovery we will all feel strong, and be able to sing “Blackfella, Whitefella”, together making our future and our descendents future healthy in the eyes of God, and healthy in Body. I assert that the first step for every single one of us is to repair our own culture, of our own selves, and to adhere to its story in every respect.

In the last week of January 2003, I met a young woman at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy who was there for Dancing on Invasion day and planned to return home fairly immediately there after, with her sister who was the mother of three children, the youngest of whom was yet a baby. She was a thoughtful, mindful, and intelligent young person with enough capacity to learn how to fulfil her Human potential within a racist environment. I do never wish to bear imagining what was done to her there because within another two weeks at the tent embassy she was visibly hating every person in sightimagining she was helping a black power cause by. By Easter she was a screaming lunatic who beat me together with her sister. Raymond is also a thoughtful, mindful, and highly intelligent individual who was in excellent self knowledge at 23 with prison behind him. I knew he was only seeking his calling in life and was not afraid of the labour of attainment. He, we will all Hope, will be, by a somewhat larger capacity to learn and relearn and accept his own fault, able to recover from experiencing the worst of what has become of modern urban Aboriginal youth culture. He was with more self restraint in the first place caused by his own self discipline. By Easter he was physically crippled by how the tent embassy expected him to be, and the false initiations they were purporting to practise there. Some of the people with whom he grew up and lived with along side other young people such as the women who hurt me at the tent embassy may have been adhering more to a cult behaviour of occluding the dearth of cultural maintaining behaviour than to their true cultural origins. I Hope He learnt, albeit the hard way, the great importance of men protecting their women folk, because all of us who truly work for Reconciliation will not tolerate Men bashing their wife. Better to leave her if you feel that way, because any good woman would run away. If need be I can shoulder knowing all of what went on at the tent embassy, in the knowledge of hurt to Aborigine youth by misunderstanding white fella culture. They may have misunderstood me in an offer I made openly by letter to lend the use of my bus. My bus was burnt inside eventually (only the plastics and electrics went), later that year in Brisbane on the street. I hope it can be remembered by young Aborigines as a vehicle for learning to access the good parts of white culture, because I could not continue lending it to an environment in which a well tended expensive vehicle was going to be intentionally trashed so withdrew its use from the tent embassy.

My Dreaming with that young Goorie fellow features strong and my every childhood nightmare inexplicably straightened out after we met. The nightmares were thereafter temporarily replaced by the tent embassy variety, yet our feeling of always been Dreaming together remains strong. Our life story may be turning into a teaching story through which many young indigenous folk whose lives are so devastated by the sudden impact of industrialisation invading their Spirit, along with all Human Spirit, and yet without the best of the management tools for a stable base within. So that they may equally learn about the white man’s way in order to understand what is that to this day of Greatest Value in their, our, and my, everybody’s Ancient Traditions, white and black. It was Aborigines who showed my self why to maintain Faith in Jesus, hand in hand with my acceptance of their traditional way, and all within a context of being expected to be able to fend for myself in an environment in which the attitudes expressed by the tent embassy are rife, an environment which is to a young Aborigine much like an African savannah would be to a city dweller. An environment in which it was inevitable I would have to stand on my merit and be exposed to extreme circumstances in which my lot could only get harder to manage, and I am managing. Do not be afraid of taking that first step, even if it is as a white skinned person calling a black skinned person racist, or a man calling a woman sexist. Too many self proclaimed white supporters of Aboriginal affairs are afraid to be called racist by Aboriginal people. As a white woman I do not claim to have experienced the kind of constant daily battering of racism in Australian life that black skinned people have formerly experienced only by unintentionally entering the line of sight of a person with white cultural prejudice. Yet, in knowledge that many more black skin people than already have may call me racist, I wish to state openly this experience of discrimination by cause only of my life story. Such discrimination is about the politics of land use and other means to access power. I am poor, white, and of little standing in most communities yet exceptionally well educated and well prepared for responsible adult life by my Father and many other people. I have been called racist by black and white skin people and assert that my skin colour is a biological hinderance in sun shine, no more, no less. I did put in the years of learning to accommodate within myself the ancestory of white men who raped Aborigine women before I identified. My handle on that history is sound and I want to be a white skinned person who can stand up in front of any Australian community and assert that it is my Aboriginal forebears, women who married for reciprocal exchange and whose families were given one bag of flour, are who cause me to be the best person I can be. Our Aborigine Spirit permeates every grain of wheat sown and harvested in Australia as surely as multinational companies have a spirit of permeating the containers of sale.

I learnt what I could not and could reconcile of cultural extremes only by following the how to I was taught within a Traditionally Oriented Aborigine Kinship unit. I there by found why I need to work for Reconciliation. Always it was Aborigines who taught me that how I am able to reconcile cultural extremes is by accepting Jesus own words “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man can come unto the Father, except by me.” . . . . . Do you know what I really believe? I do not believe for an instant that Jesus is for all time Absolving every person on Earth who professes Faith in Him, of their every misdeed. How could we then learn to be Forgiving like Him? Can you tell anything about myself from what I write? It certainly isn’t that old Irish recommendation of the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail of total Faith in. I know there are massive numbers of people who would end every perception of any and every imagined advantage brought about by sin. Who among readers can define sin? One day Humanity will make this Earth safe for children. I write to say I will not tolerate as a Land Rights activist and a Mother and a Human Being the fact that my children have been experiencing nightmares about characters chasing them with sticks to force up an anus ever since they spent four nights at the Aboriginal tent embassy, during which I was physically threatened with exactly that and beaten because I would not accept. It matters to me not that the tent embassy would not accept my Aboriginality, and it matters to me a lot that my children experienced a nightmare. I may never know how to communicate to court how I know who was with them and what happened while I was escaping being hurt. Yet I know. What matters greatly to my self and children is that Christian Aborigines accept my Aboriginality. I hope young Raymond finds the path out of the abuse he was subject to initially through an association with my self by residents of the tent embassy and thereafter by any who forced all tent embassy residents to feel behelden quite illegally by drug money, and that our future is one in which there is no shame for white and black skinned people to Love one another.

It is about time every one of us increases our capacities of passive tolerance is what my lesson in Jesus Christ teaching is. All under the Southern Cross for life will make Reconciliation walk after walk after, . . . walk but not until after my children are safe! As soon as possible! - Will be before Christmas- because danger to them from domestic violence increases in school holidays. In defending the false case against my self that I am too unwell to be a good mother, my former drunken Irish partner painted himself to be a Mickey Mouse who simultaneously imagines President George W. Bush’s words as though God’s and in vanity portrayed himself as tirelessly campaigning against war, rape and racial discrimination, discrimination against himself as indigenous of Ireland of course. A good Catholic his mother yet he refused permission for the children to attend the local Catholic Primary School in Kaleen Canberra, on the grounds that Catholicism oppressed him. I am highly tolerant and would bear him no grudge: the house deposit; and nine and a half years covering his alcohol consumption he cost me were alway his; for the children’s sake, so he could prove himself better than my regard for him. It is not any of my business that he proved himself worse. The children I bore to him are my business. The court case may build into a version of Monty Python’s mockery of the Spanish Inquisition, because I can not manage the easiest way through since that way I could be perceived as worsening my symptoms of mental illness. I guess my children will develop a healthy interest in Legal work with case records to work through during their teenage enquiring. If my passive tolerance learnt by following Jesus teaching, is substantive, then my children’s is truly great and they need be compared with Saints.

I considered leaving readers with the question burning to my self unanswered, and in many ways am unable to answer it. I hold precise specific beliefs that need scientific investigation in the field of medical research. Yet never the less I can attempt to give an explanation to why Aborigines are maintaining a cosmology and culture that is simultaneously more encompassing than others and more irrefutable from within. Hopefully an explanation that fits within the media of this article. On the whole the answer is within an Aboriginal cosmology too obvious to bother noting outwardly, a matter that every Aborigine implicitly knows. The best that I am able to state with in an Anglo-Saxon Christian Culture is by comparing the social fabric to a chemical experiment. In chemistry we know that like dissolves like, a most basic law of nature, placing that Law in the realm of Human feelings, like dissolves do like. In the test tube is a set of damaged feelings and to that are added somewhat more subtle indicators of that exact damage, and the result is exactly like the similarities in shape of a detergent molecule and a fat molecule enabling the detergent to adhere to the fat and the two together can then wash away in water. So think of the detergent as being native Australian Fauna and Flora and the fat the possibility of damage to Human feelings. The feelings are kept clean by a process inimical to mass vaccination to small pox, with a cow pox virus, the cow pox in this example being the idea of Native Flora and Fauna. Unless you are an Aborigine who follows Kinship Law it can not make real sense. The immunity provided is the immunity to acquiring faults of not noticing our selves. Now there has been wide spread misunderstandings promulgated by many, maybe bit get this bit right another bit wrong, maybe other way around. Precisely because this is a sacred realm of communication, and can not be transmitted other that face to face. One of the consequences to what is noticeable difference in physiology, noted in many ways as simultaneously a decreased susceptibility to disease so long as strict cultural codes of conduct and diet are adhered to, and an increased susceptibility to disease in the extreme conditions numbers of Aborigines today live in, is an engendering of a potential for proficiency in the Art of the Science of Saint Matthew, so veering away from the not here definable physical differences that are, is functional difference within the School of Kabalahist thought, and all that said I would prefer to use words to describe the distinguishing cultural differences. A recently departed senior elder in His book Kakadu Man describes the difference of body in being Aborigine better than I ever could being a woman.

All Aborigine families are maintained by individuals with essential expertise in Science of Saint Matthew. The Fathering within an Aboriginal Cosmological Framework is strict in constant application of a structure that is ordered consecutively by adherence to a known to be successful sequence of events in which Human fears are well managed. We are all bound to fall in step with our ancestors stories. The Aboriginal point of view of Dreamtime being simultaneously a time long before during which creation of species occurred, and a time we all live with and in now is simple in understanding accurately when with in good cultural bounds in which intense internal self discipline is maintained. Is not God remaking us all in every moment? That being said, the Art of the Science of Saint Mathew is the way I am able to maintain my sense of decent Humanity amid varying absurdities imagined about myself.

Here are a few other distinct cultural differences. In very general terms Aboriginal women think more highly of their Husband than of themselves, yet are not reluctant to become their opponents in politics. In fact another inimically Aboriginal attribute is for the polemic in culture to be accommodated and reconciled between husband and wife. Men’s business is of a qualitative difference to women’s. Women do not aspire to it because they have their own business to look after, including roles that until recently in Euro-centric cultures were the reserve of Men. Once an old Indian Man, a friend of my Father stated in my presence as a child: “A Man seeks enlightenment by thinking of higher things and a Woman seeks enlightenment by serving Her Husband”. Those words stayed with me until I understood why, notably by poking my nose into men’s business and finding out I am better at Women’s business. I learnt recently from the television, that a favourite saying of Mrs. Donald Bradman was: “never so bad as not good for something”. This is an example, and a strictly adhered to one for Aborigines, of a cultural quality that is expressible in every day language and is also a quality adhered to by many non-Aboriginal Australians. It is the best fit phrase I have heard for the philosophy underlying the Science of Saint Mathew. There are in fact plenty of cultural expressions in our Euro-centric culture that fit well within an Aborigine Cosmology. Non-Aborigines need only accept and value such cultural expression to modify ourselves and adapt to the cultural assets that Aborigine communities have been offering in trade since 1788.

I read an American Christian Publication in which Baiame (also spelt Byame, or Bhyame), was being related within Christian Culture as a representation of Jesus. Did the American Christian readership know about Bhyame’s first initiation? We all, all us mob, whole lot, were turned into animals. Christian morality aside for a while, Buddists and Hindi teach that we risk being incarnated as animals by behaving, and so being mindfully too, like an animal, during now each moment we live. I believe it is a painful existence an animal and it tempers our Souls to never behave as such even in great temptation. Well only obvious thing to express is good on American Christians for trusting Bhyame turned us into animals not by making us behave like animals but only with a gently irrefutable psychological knot at the end of a tale. I know here I stand in disagreement to the tent embassy and many other modern Aborigines in the Eastern parts of Australia. At the heart of my disagreement with the tent embassy and other Aborigine communities, disagreement with their vehement attempts to discredit my self to all and sundry thereafter, was only that I refused to let them initiate my self falsely, as though in Bhyame’s name, by anal penetration. I know such initiations exist as forms of forcing an internal awareness of needful mindfulness of every cogniscence, and yet I am able to be so mindful with out every having been so treated. Thank God for Sufi Wisdom. As far as I have been made aware the original initiation into a degree of cultural competence had already been falsified along parts of the eastern seaboard of Australia, and perhaps some way inland, before Europeans arrived. Now I know I am not going to be able to maintain that belief without people hating me. My every approach to Aborigine communities is with acceptance of their cultural habit and the offer of in true reciprocal exchange a differing form of initiation. Sure, to this day Traditionally Oriented initiation rites involve ritual scarification, some of which in fact prevents anal penetration, yet never any that in any way that damages bodily function. Bhyame’s teaching is as simple as to trust Human feeling. He turns us into animals. Something just doesn’t feel right. Trust Bhyame to be correct. Are you convinced yet?

There has been too much political debate about what defines a sacred site. The Hindmarsh Island court case was a matter that highlighted the issue in a way that simultaneously left sacred site ritual managers open to abuse and broadened the debate. Is it not obvious that when rituals are performed for constant recreation of our environmental heritage that the places those rituals are performed in, albeit that they are able to change, and any place could be so sung, are sacred only by fact of there being a Human Spirit of needfully re-singing the song of creating that place for the providence of. Aborigines might not want to sing Hindmarsh Island bridge, but every innocent among will sing Eternity on Sydney Harbour bridge. Give Aborigines a key to regularly performing at the Opera House and the Shells of the roof could sung into being a regular basis also in tune with Eternity on the bridge. I know the song of Eternity on Sydney Harbour bridge. My Grandfather was there watching them build it unfortunately as a young child not attending school, only because his father was alcoholic and violent. Eternity was a shiny sign of beware of bridging waters that need calls for a swim through sharks to cross. Library songs are so worth investing in and may many Aborigines sing. I know a traffic light song too, and I could sing it to my children in sacred tones because it warns them not to cross in danger. Many Aborigines sing Song of Solomon. Many Uranium deposits are sacred sites reminding of our Ancestors work song been sung leaving footprint of danger from. Diamond deposits are a site to be reckoned with and abuse of is calculated as sever in penalty. I reckon Aborigines are taking white fella songs seriously and will maintain any song on an as need requires basis. Will white men who believe in Faeries help to maintain ours? A song for squattocracy who employ latest technology from permaculture designers we could sing together. I know a geologist who wrote a thesis on the method by which modern day scientists can detect underground copper deposits by surface rocks alone, and I can categorically state we Aborigine will not sing Her song. After many excellent offers of employment in the mining industry she decided Her moral value was to continue employment as a prostitute instead and she went on to educating other prostitutes about safer sex in favour of mining industry money. Let me raise my children to sing didgeridoo song of how the Land of Faery is indeed of Dreamtime True.

Another cultural phenomenon recorded by non-Aborigines in studying Aborigines is the acceptance that to name a thing brings it into being part of the world you know within your culture. Not to know words for plant food from over there may not mean that you do not speak the language of those people, only that you have not a food collecting right on that land over there. Perhaps these are the same thing. Many authors with in Euro-centric cultures have written about the naming of something giving the namer of in a power over it, as though it were they who sang it into existence. Yet I could say I know the words: plant and flora; and also mitochondria, respiration and photosynthesis; I have studied how all plants create and reserve energy and can sing a song of labelling of these phenomena. It doesn’t give me gathering rights to all plants though does it. Yet that is the attitude perceived in many of mainstream culture by Aborigines. However a research scientist doing field research for the maintenance of species does get a different right to be in a place than other folk. The key again is entirely encompassed by the Traditionally Oriented Aborigine Kinship systems. Within Aborigine Kinship, when you learn who you are you also learn names and what to enact to maintain the quantities and quality of foods that you are allowed to harvest and eat. Essentially those foods are the very same foods that best maintain your unique health. While within Good culture Aborigines are even today living longer, and healthier lives, even in poverty: in every context in which the original culture is not ratified Aborigines are accepting the worst rates of disease prevalence of diseases such as diabetes, so obviously diet related.

In the final analysis I encourage all to take on board the words of Lowitja O’Donahuge and many other senior Aborigine Elders about Aboriginal Health. There can be no reconciliation while our children are not in good health because of a society in which the cultural base of Christianity is so invaded that Santa who symbolises the Joy of Christ’s birth for children, became a surreptitious vehicle for advertising coca cola. The many European immigrants to America had a wide variety of regional costumes for someone who seemingly magically to all children provides what their parents could not afford to. Santa Claus is such an important part of the enculturation process for all of God’s children. The insidious red and white costume that even landed on an Australian surfing Santa stamp was initially popularised by a coca cola advertisement in America early last century. Humphrey Queen’s book about big coke and little coke was my best lesson in the Humanity maintained within a Marxist world view. We do need to wake up to the fact that no body, not even those wealthy Americans who send soldiers to die in the Middle East seemingly to claim a superior Faith in all perception of righteousness of God, no body wants their children’s health damaged by drinking too much sugary water with caffeine in it. We all need as a matter of imperative to find our common ground, and I believe Aborigines, living within Traditionally Oriented Kinship structure are provenly the best people in the world a doing just that. Within well tempered culture we are all well tempered people.

What is the cultural context in which we can better work with modern medicine to improve Aborigine Health. My Father’s Doctoral Thesis in Nuclear Magnetic Resonancing in the late sixties and early seventies laid the foundations for modern Magnetic Resonancing machinery in hospitals. It seemed quite magic to myself as a child that he read pages of graph measurements as a machine spewed them forth like a book. Similar to conductors, who read entire musical scores with imagining every note in mind as I imagine the sound of single words when I read. We none of us can deny the immense value of modern medicine, yet when it came to symptoms akin to mental illness a Buddhist exorcism was more effective that medication. What does that imply to you? To myself there are a myriad of connotations to the words I just wrote. What is the cultural basis for validity simultaneously of an exorcism and a heart transplant operation? Certainly many medical practitioners are aware that it is explained within the work of hypnotists that many patients recover far better from surgical procedures during which they are under anesthesia when the surgeons and nurses give the patients affirmations of their body maintaining homeostasis and recollect aloud stories of recovery from the conditions they are operating to alleviate. Is there an answer simply in the Aborigine physiology being more suggestible under hypnosis? Worth a research grant.

In every certainty many people can not step out side their own cultural point of view, and it could be harmful to force them to try to without providing a firm basis in another culture. In the realm of the kind of life altering circumstances that enable such without special preparation, there is the requirement of an immense physical shock as well as good provision of a broader point of view. When I was eighteen, I travelled to New Zealand and was caught in a Landslide, or was it a mudslide? it was a kind of mud, tree, rocks, part of hill slide, and immediately prior to the downstairs of the building I was attempting to sleep in becoming full of side-of –hill, I distinctly quieted my fear of close proximity lightening and thunder with “Of Course – We Are All Safe – We Are In A Building People Built Here”. I learnt young about the strength of natural forces being unconquerable by any people. Such an experience could explain why I experienced some disassociative disorders within a schizo-typal personality by placing within the umbrella of post traumatic stress. I can not cope with loud noises. I would not wish myself any other way since that experience only worked to the benefit of my intellectual development, despite, rather than because of the subsequent regard for my mental health. I was instilled with a grown up self regard of consistently questioning as I remember well from childhood, Why me? Why am I? Did it have to be me who got into a mudslide worth the fifteen minutes of fame of a big picture on the front of the Canberra Times?

How can we know what kind of society we are all humanly trying to work to create? Will it be with a Judaic legal foundation, that we already access and a good foundation it is, with a Christian flooring, Islamic walls, and I began to imagine a Buddhist roof until I remembered their funny yellow sky brushing hats, we can’t look too silly can we. How about the Hindu texts for a roof. The Mahabarata was the original song cycle that Ancient Greek Mythology came from so regardless of the many cultural differences between mainstream Australia and mainstream India, somehow the Mahabarata’s stories are part of what makes us psychologically who we are. The Buddhists fit it better to be the house doors, they are excellent with gates and locks. That leaves the windows for Traditionally Oriented Aboriginal Cosmology, and I reckon we’ll all be living with a good view. Some where along the line I some how sub-consciously left out quite a few aspects of life that are very real for some people. For example, I never could totally convince myself that crop circles are a real phenomena. I made a subconscious executive decision to leave them out of my vision of reality. I don’t know why, when I’ve read of crop circles that are unable to be found cause for, as well as the crop circles that are known hoaxes. People make a living out of researching them. Do people make a living out of fabricating them? Even with a TV show on tonight about crop circles I can not conceive of living to experience such a phenomena in my environment, and I am not prepared to wonder why not. That’s that for crop circles.

On the whole I would reckon that true Reconciliation between all people of all cultures, races, ethnicities, what ever words you ascribe to, and especially Reconciliation between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Australians requires, of course, an ability and willingness on all our parts to open our cultural bounds somewhat, just enough to find more common ground. We all need know enough to know that we do not always need to know. Be prepared to allow your self and perceptions to be challenged by any Reconciliation process. Fundamentally the cultural pragmatism of Traditionally Oriented Aborigine Kinship systems is such that it lends itself to a context of cross cultural communication in which the necessary boundaries of other cultural considerations are not crossed. Many students of anthropology struggle to cognise kinship, yet when your sense of “I am” is “I am a Nungarrayi skin” or whatever your skin is, and there are prescribed bounds of interaction between a Nungarrayi and every other skin, then Kinship is in fact a simplifying aspect of culture. It is easy to superimpose Kinship structure into any other culture, even if a few of us may discover we are in habits of interacting that are not conducive to best social relations. We do already know this, and I assert that Kinship explains such and provides means for all of us to prevent such in future interactions within any culture. Finally for Reconciliation, with accepting that so long as we know ourself and examine all our human relationships, we need focus our energy on Aboriginal health, to enable healthy Aboriginal communities to approach non-Aboriginal communities without fear of their boundaries being crossed.

I posted Bruce Chatwin’s book, “Songlines” to my Father today. Maybe we can communicate better about the Bicentenary, the Olympics, Science and Culture in the future. This is all I have to write for now and hope that the Future is one in which many, many people may be able to cognise that, short only an upcoming court appearance on 30th September 2004, this story has closure for me.

This essay was originally written between 8th September and 24th September 2004, and Always and in Everything with every benefit from any of this work going to my children. “Hello Reconciliation” © Rebekah Copas 2004 .

However the last paragraphs were always left open ended, since the story is obviously as yet without closure. I had hoped by now to be able to provide the tale of a successful legal win against the removal of Aboriginal children from a safe loving home environment, but instead have only to report that the case continues, and that the whole story of how I always knew I was and am a good mother, is because my children are and always were the heros of this story. It is they who, with only 2hrs supervised access with myself once a fortnight, in which I gave them religious instruction (in Aboriginal cosmology within an Islamic framework), and useful things to attach their memories of to; and just barely managed to maintain them not believing lies about themselves, it is they who managed to continue to express their confidence in myself. They made enough good for myself to be totally certain we are making Reconciliation happen. But I will not leave it at that. The fact is that other Aboriginal persons, both white and black, whom were removed from maternal care when children and are now grown up, have also expressed confidence in my self. That stolen generations is a matter for the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime, and the roles we all play therein is becoming a matter of greater significance because of the active interest the Islamic community has begun to perceive in the family court situation. The fact of my court case, is that both my identity as an Aborigine and as a Moslem are being defined as insanity, but by an insane reasoning process, that can only ultimately shake the foundations of the Australian legislative justice system. The real case is for the sanity of adherance to Shari'ah and within a black persons culture, and the fight for the victory of black culture and shari'ah being the definition of internal sanity will not be lost. The fact that, as a well educated white skin person I have been discriminated against by almost all social institutions in Australia today because I adhere to a black skin persons culture, whilst I am clearly white skin, is indicative of the fact that racial oppression has always been about more than our differences of biology. On this land we stand united in our real worth as the people whom love Earth. Perhaps one day I will finish this and a few other essays.

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“Hello Reconciliation” © Rebekah Copas 2nd June 2006 .
Any excerpt from this may be copied for any use in adherence with aims of the Council for Reconciliation, the maintenance of healthy Human culture, and for any Land Rights claim. The whole may be reproduced without alterations, and excepting if for financial gain. Any use of this work must be awarded to my son's own unique merit, whose Dreamtime has informed and inspired this work. Waram.